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what percent of the house or senate does it take to expel a member quizlet

"Each House may make up one's mind the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."
—Article 1, section 5, clause 2

The Constitution grants the House broad power to discipline its Members for acts that range from criminal misconduct to violations of internal House Rules. While the constitutional dominance to punish a Member who engages in "hell-raising Behaviour" is intended, in part, as an instrument of individual rebuke, information technology serves principally to protect the reputation of the institution and to preserve the dignity of its proceedings.

Over the decades, several forms of discipline take evolved in the Firm. The most astringent type of penalization is expulsion from the House, which is followed by censure, and finally reprimand. Expulsion, as mandated in the Constitution, requires a 2-thirds majority vote. Censure and reprimand, which evolved through House precedent and do, are imposed by a simple majority of the full House.

Fernando Wood stood at the Speaker's rostrum to be censured for /tiles/not-collection/2/2009_130_001crop_wood_censure.xml Drove of the U.S. House of Representatives
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Tammany Hall Democrat Fernando Wood stood at the Speaker's rostrum to be censured for "unparliamentary language" in 1868 during the 40th Congress. No stranger to inflammatory speech, Forest reportedly had referred to a piece of legislation equally "a monstrosity, a measure out of the about infamous acts of this infamous Congress."

These are not the only penalties which the Firm may levy on its Members. Beginning with the creation of a formal ethics process in the late 1960s, the Committee on Ethics (which for many years was called the Commission on Standards of Official Bear) has had the ability to issue a formal "Letter of Reproval." The Ethics Committee may besides opt to annals its disapproval of a particular action using more informal ways. Committee rules, as well as the rules of the individual party caucuses, provide other means of subject area. For instance, Members may also be fined, stripped of committee leadership positions and seniority, or deprived of other privileges depending on the infractions.

Expulsion

The sternest form of penalisation that the Firm has imposed on its Members is expulsion, an action which it has used but 5 times in more than 2 centuries.

The Constitution empowers both the House and the Senate to expel a sitting Member who engages in "disorderly Behaviour," requiring a two-thirds vote of those nowadays and voting in the chamber to which the Member belongs. As these are internal matters, neither the House nor the Senate requires the concurrence of the other sleeping accommodation to expel ane of its own Members.

In devising this framework, the Ramble Convention drew upon British legislative tradition as well as nearly 175 years of precedent in the colonial assemblies in Due north America. Other than the 2-thirds requirement, however, the Framers left information technology up to the House and Senate to make up one's mind their own rules and the type of beliefs that might warrant expulsion from their respective chambers.

Despite this wide grant of authorisation, the Framers set the two-thirds threshold because such an action would necessarily remove someone who had been elected by the popular vote of his or her constituents. And though the House has wide discretion to act in such cases, it has demonstrated bang-up deference to the peoples' option of their Representatives. One measure of that restraint is that the House has never expelled any Member for carry that took place before his or her House service. Nor has the Firm removed Members for action in a prior Congress when the electorate insisted on re-electing them to the House despite a record of improper conduct.1

Thomas Nast Cartoon reacting to the Credit Mobilier scandal /tiles/non-collection/n/nast_credit_mobilier_2014_141_000.xml Collection of the U.Due south. House of Representatives
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This 1873 Harper'due south Weekly cartoon illustrates the backwash of the Crédit Mobilier scandal. The House investigated the railroad influence scheme and censured ii of its Members—Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and James Brooks of New York—for using their office for personal gain. Cartoonist Thomas Nast decried the widespread graft, implying that the multitude of resolutions that condemned abuse and buried the Business firm rostrum were insincere attempts at reform.

Expulsion has traditionally been reserved as punishment for only the nearly reprehensible conduct or crimes such as treasonous acts confronting the government. The first 3 individuals expelled from the House—Missourians John B. Clark and John W. Reid, and Henry C. Burnett of Kentucky—took up arms for the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the modern era, expulsion has been used on two other occasions, both of which involved egregious violations of criminal constabulary and/or flagrant abuses of office.

While expulsion has been used sparingly, it should be noted that some Members who faced imminent expulsion from the Business firm have chosen to resign instead. Two Members who sold appointments to U.S. military academies shortly after the Ceremonious War, South Carolina'southward Benjamin Whittemore and North Carolina's John DeWeese, resigned their seats earlier the House voted to expel them. Adamant to annals its antipathy for their beliefs, the Business firm still censured both men, even afterward their resignations.

Others lost their seats in subsequent elections before the House took formal activity. The Framers anticipated this possibility and, in part, used it to rationalize the House's two-year ballot cycle. As James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 57, "the House of Representatives is then constituted as to support in the members an habitual recollection of their dependence on the people. Before the sentiments impressed on their minds past the mode of their elevation can be effaced by the exercise of power, they will be compelled to conceptualize the moment when their power is to finish, when their practice of it is to exist reviewed, and when they must descend to the level from which they were raised; there forever to remain unless a faithful discharge of their trust shall have established their title to a renewal of information technology."2 See a list of Members who have been expelled from the House of Representatives.

Censure

While censure also derives from the same constitutional clause, information technology is not a term the Framers expressly mentioned.3

Censure does not remove a Fellow member from office. Once the House approves the sanction by majority vote, the censured Fellow member must stand up in the well of the House ("the bar of the Firm" was the nineteenth-century term) while the Speaker or presiding officeholder reads aloud the censure resolution and its preamble as a grade of public rebuke.

Decades earlier the House kickoff expelled Members it contemplated censure to annals its deep disapproval of a Member's behavior. Early in its existence, the Firm considered (simply did not ultimately employ) censure to punish Matthew Lyon of Vermont and Roger Griswold of Connecticut for well-publicized breaches of decorum in early 1798. Lyon had spat on Griswold during a heated argument and, when the House later declined to expel or censure the Vermonter, Griswold sought to defend his award past caning him at his desk. Consumed by this "affray," the House created a Committee on Privileges to investigate the incident though it ultimately refused to recommend a punishment afterwards both men promised "to keep the peace."

Especially during the nineteenth century, when politicians fought duels over affronts to their honor and reputation, censure emerged equally a means to effectively challenge a Member's integrity. From the early on 1830s to the belatedly 1860s, the House censured individuals for unacceptable carry that occurred largely during floor argue. The first fourth dimension the House censured i of its own occurred in 1832 when William Stanbery of Ohio insulted Speaker Andrew Stevenson of Virginia. But since these transgressions did not rise to the level of expulsion, Business firm practice required a simple majority vote on a resolution by those Members present and voting.

Tally Sheet for the vote to expel Representative Preston Brooks /tiles/non-collection/l/lfp_035imgpres1.xml Image courtesy of the National Athenaeum and Records Administration
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In July 1856, the Business firm voted on a motion to expel Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina from Congress for his fierce assault against Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. Every bit the above vote tally sheet indicates, the Business firm did not accomplish the two-thirds vote necessary to strip Brooks of his seat, with 121 Members voting to expel him and 95 voting against removal.

Indeed, though the House notably rebuked several Gilded Age Members for bribery, near nineteenth-century censures were handed downwards for unparliamentary beliefs, usually defamatory or insulting statements fabricated confronting a Firm colleague. In 1856, in the wake of peradventure the well-nigh well-known episode of congressional violence, the House censured Laurence Keitt for assisting fellow South Carolinian Preston Brooks as he brutally assaulted Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane on the Senate Floor; the Firm failed to muster the 2-thirds vote necessary to expel Brooks. Believing that putting the question to their constituents would vindicate them, both Keitt and Brooks resigned their seats and subsequently won the special elections to fill up their own vacancies. A decade later, Lovell Rousseau of Kentucky suffered the censure penalization for caning Iowan Josiah Grinnell after the two exchanged insults about their respective military service in the Civil State of war. Like Keitt, Rousseau resigned his seat afterwards the indignity of being censured but to have constituents re-elect him. Encounter a list of Members who have been censured by the Firm of Representatives.

Reprimand

Similar censure, the word reprimand does not appear in the Constitution. And its significant has changed over time. For much of the House's history, in fact well into the twentieth century, the give-and-take reprimand was used interchangeably with censure. For instance, the censure resolution passed against Thomas L. Blanton in 1921 directed him to the bar of the Business firm to receive its "reprimand and censure."

The modernistic use of the term reprimand evolved relatively recently, following the cosmos of a formal ethics process in the late 1960s.iv A reprimand registers the Firm's disapproval for deport that warrants a less severe rebuke than censure. Typically, in modern practice, the Ethics Commission recommends a reprimand (as it does in the example of censure) past submitting a resolution accompanied with a report to the full House. Reprimand requires a unproblematic majority vote on the resolution brought before the Firm and, in some instances, may exist implemented simply past the adoption of the commission report. A reprimanded Fellow member is not required to stand up in the well of the House to accept a exact admonishment. Since the commencement example of the House taking such action in 1976, a total of 11 individuals have been reprimanded by the House. Meet a list of Members who have been reprimanded past the House of Representatives.

For Further Reading

Chocolate-brown, Cynthia, "Expulsion, Censure, Reprimand, and Fine: Legislative Subject field in the House of Representatives," Study No. RL31382, 27 June 2016, Congressional Inquiry Service, Washington, DC.

Commission on Ethics, "Historical Summary of Conduct Cases in the House of Representatives, 1798–2004," http://ethics.house.gov/sites/ethics.house.gov/files/Historical_Chart_Final_Version%20in%20Word_0.pdf (accessed 20 March 2017).

_______. "Summary of Activities," http://ethics.house.gov/reports/summary-activities (accessed twenty March 2017).

Congressional Record, House, 67th Cong., 1st sess. (27 October 1921): 6880–6896.

Hinds, Asher C. Hinds' Precedents of the Business firm of Representatives of the United States, Vol. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Press Office, 1907): Chapter 52 §1642–1643: 1114–1116.

Maskell, Jack H., "Discipline of Members," in Donald C. Bacon et al., eds, The Encyclopedia of the The states Congress Vol. 2 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995): 641–646.

McKay, William, and Charles W. Johnson. Parliament & Congress: Representation & Scrutiny in the 20-First Century (New York: Oxford University Printing, 2014): 517–546.

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Source: https://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-Development/Discipline/

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